In times to come we'll say this was a mild winter. There has been little snow, only one morning, I think, that the boys came to shovel, just one school delay, my new snow boots standing still unused at the back door. Already the daffodil bed is full of deep green shoots that will likely bloom before Easter.

That daffodil bed dates from the fall of 1978, when I'd been in this house just over two years. My first husband dug it after I saw a picture in a magazine. I didn't know then that bulbs were the perfect gardening idea for me. You can set them in a carefully-prepared bed, mulch them, and then forget them for six or seven months. They bloom in the spring, require little care, die back by themselves and provide their own nourishment, and then repeat the process the next year. Although attention from the gardener will improve the look and the health of the bed, total inattention works as well, since once the bulbs are in they are more or less self-sufficient.

There's a downside to this, of course. Bulbs have a limited bloom time, the stronger varieties will force out the weaker ones so that only one or two kinds remain, and an untended patch can look very messy. My daffodil bed started as a circle about six feet in diameter sourrounding the central tree just off the back deck. A few years after it went in I planted English ivy as a ground cover. Over the years the bed has widened itself to about ten or twelve feet in diameter and the ivy has begun to invade the lawn grass. When we remodeled the kitchen we essentially put a room where the deck had been and built a new deck onto the back of that, so that the space between the house and the daffodil bed is little more than a walkway now.

And I've lost the will and the physical capacity ro do much but enjoy the daffodils by looking at them. Last year Ron persuaded me to give up the bed, and we contracted with our lawn service to have it dug up and replanted with grass and maybe a few new bulbs. But weather conditions worked against us. Whenever the lawn service was ready to begin the work, it was either too dry or too wet. As a result, the bed is still out there, and I'll have one more season to enjoy it before I have to say goodbye.

There's a lot of metaphor in this. I know that one of the obsessions that appears again and again in my writing is a reluctance to let go of something that is already lost. There is much to explore in what that daffofil patch represents for me.